Planting season!

It's planting season, so we have been busy sowing seeds from carrots to corn, planting lettuce and eggplant, and Itilling in cover crops. Our Crimson Clover looks awesome - it's in full bloom and we'll probably disc it in next week. We finished planting our onions first and they look out over a lovely view of the Quabbin Reservoir. you can see the cows in the pasture just beyond the field.

We work with the student farmers about 5 half-day sessions a week. Nate and I break the group up sometimes so they get time on the tractor discing and chisel plowing and also time with their hands in the soil helping to transplant and weed and seed in the greenhouse. We go on a field walk once a week to check out how all the crops are doing and to make a list of what to do next. I've been learning tons on the tractor - from basketweeding on the cubs to bed shaping on the john deere.

The rest of the week, student farmers work with Olivier, the livestock manager, to care for the pigs, chickens, horses and sheep. They take classes on business planning (actually - a condensed version of what I took over the winter), visit other farms, and work on their home garden.

April 30

SO. Once I’ve caught up from the winter of not writing, here’s a bit about life these days. I’m writing from Lady Killigrew, a lovely little café overlooking a waterfall next to the Bookmill “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”. I drove over this afternoon to let the piñata I’ve been constructing dry. I hung it on the clothesline outside the house in Wendell.


Wendell is a lovely little town (village, perhaps?) of 900. Nestled between “the valley” (the liberal, organic farmy Connecticut river valley, full of coffeeshops and college students) and “central mass”, the hilly, never never land between eastern and western mass, home more to dairy farms with a more almost Appalachian vibe. Wendell is still certainly in the valley, while north orange, where I work, isn’t. I’m renting from Theresa, the teacher at the chicken coop school, a one room school house for 7th and 8th graders at maggies farm. It’s lovely to live with someone who works there so we can talk and carpool…and is also someone I rarely see at work, so we certainly have our own lives. The house is a fascination – it was moved to Wendell from the quabbin and has a least two separate additions and wiring to match (apparently there are about 25 different phone jacks in the house). In the back, she has a bunch of small cold frams, covered with old windows, where we’ve planted kale and swiss chard and onions. She’s strung up a hammock from the back deck, where I like to drink coffee on a weekend morning, and it has a lovely little woodstove just off the kitchen, where I like to curl up and read in the weekday evenings.

We had our first all farm school softball game of the season yesterday and I’m happy to report my team (team Chives) was victorious!

Otherwise I’m in the midst of several books, as usual – The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, Javatrekkers, by Dean (of Dean’s beans, a local coffee roaster) and what I just bought “how to fix damn near everything”, by franklynn Peterson.

Just before leaving western mass, I went to a couple of good craft visits with the caretaker apprentices and managed to get a good crew up to the lenox contra dance! I’m excited to join Theresa and some of my new neighbors at Greenfield, a legendary one.

Viva Mexico

Mexico Blog

Once I got a job at the farm school, I wanted to take advantage of the free time to go visit my parents in Mexico. They live in Queretaro, about 2 ½ hours northwest of Mexico City, and since the last time I was there they’d bought a new house. My dad came and picked me up at the airport and we took a bus back home. My mom had me come to heer English conversation group the next morning, and they recommended the seminar that day, so we went to hear all about how viruses affected human evolution.

Then we went to meet Guillaume, a recent grad from the American School (in Queretaro, not from Mexico city where I went), who has started his own business as a local distributor of produce. He took me to a couple of the greenhouses he buys from – a tomato greenhouse near Bernal, and a hydroponic lettuce greenhouse close to Leon.

The tomato greenhouse was fascinating. Although it was hydroponic, the tomatoes are rooted in tezontle, a volcanic gravel (kind of like red pumice), and then the nutrients and pumped through in water in a drip irrigation system. It was fascinating how careful you have to be in such a big monoculture – we put on white suits and walked through a bleach shower before going into the greenhouse. They have to buy in hives of bees to pollinate. The company was started byu Dutch folks, who are well known for their experience with greenhouses. But many of the tenets of greenhouse growing in Holland don’t hold true in mexico. In Holland, you want glass greenhouses, because they all the most light to pass through. More light = more productivity. Not so in Mexico. In mexico, water, not sunlight is the limiting factor. So they shifted to more translucent plastic greenhouses. They use white landscape fabric on the floor instead of black, to cool it down more. They string up their tomatoes like Eliot Coleman (using indeterminate vines, only the last 8 feet continues to produce tomatoes, so you clip the top of the vine to almost a “clothesline” that runs across the greenhouse at 8 feet high. As the plants grow, you just slide the clotheline along a pulley. So the root end of the tomato stays put and the productive 8 feet is shifted over, and the older part of the plant is horizontal along the floor. ) In Maine, this makes the tomato plants look like “J”s. but in mexico, where they keep the same plants growing for 9 months, the old vines strung along the floor become dents ropes of many plants.

I got to play some piano, spend some time reading on our back porch, cook with my mom, walk around downtown Queretaro while the jacarandas are blooming. Sunday we went to Freixenet, a vineyard near Bernal and then to a beautiful restaurant with a view of the Pena of Bernal. Totally beautiful! With that and fresh orange juice and mangos de manila…my trip was complete.

Essex Farm

January through February I worked at Essex Farm – up on Lake Champlain. I learned a ton:
- how to make soap: mix lye with water, cool it down to about 100F (it’s helpful to have a foot of snow on the ground so you can stick the pot of hot lye solution in the snow), and heat lard (or in our case, a mix of lard, which is from pigs, and tallow, fat from cows) to about 100F. then mix them. After a lot of stirring, it undergoes saponification, which is when it thickens to about the consistency of sour cream (if you drop a bit of it on the surface, the surface “supports” the drop, for a bit). Then you let it cool for a few days, then you cut it into bars, and then you let it cure for a few weeks. Then we gave it out to members.
- how to strip cows: at Caretaker, we would leave the calf on Chloe, so it wasn’t super essential to get every last drop of milk out of the cow. But at Essex, where we kept the calves separate, it’s important to milk the cows out so they don’t get infections that can lead to mastitis. Milking is one of my favorite things. It’s such an intimate relationship with an animal. There is an overall sense of care and respect for the cows, and at both farms discussions of particular teats was common. To milk a cow out, it helps to use both hands on the same teat, squeezing the udder with one hand (for me, usually my left) just before squeezing the teat with my right. This helps to get the last of the milk. For more…read “The Family Cow”. I recommend it.
- how to set up an evaporator for maple sugaring season: Sugaring is usually a February –March activity in New England. While there are “freeze thaw cycles”, when the temperature goes below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap in the sugar maples runs. Once you tap the trees (big operations often use tubing, Essex did buckets, which means you have to go empty the buckets when they fill), you have about 6 weeks before the trees heal over. It takes about 40 gallons of the slightly sweet sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. Usually the light syrup (grade A), comes from the beginning of the season and grade B from the end (I prefer grade B – it has more of a distinct maple flavor). The evaporator we had at essex had a pre warming tank, where the sap would flow over the back of the chimney to get warmed up before going into the back pan (still over the back of the evaporator), and then into the front pan. We also had a HUGE tank (nicknamed Bubby, the name imprinted in it, not to be confused with the cat that had stubby legs and would pretend to fall down in front of you to get attention), that held the syrup when we brought it in, and gravity fed it into the whole evaporator system.

Essex is a lovely little town on the lake. I lived right across from the ferry dock, and could see the little green light at the end of the dock (felt a bit like Daisy from The Great Gatsby). I had run-ins with Casper, a Jersey bull they were using (apparently, when you have your period you should be particularly careful around bulls), helped matt and sam move the sows into farrowing pens, in which we’d constructed little tables that fit into the corners so the piglets could fit underneath and the sows wouldn’t be able to sit on them. I got my time in hand milking a jersey down to 10 minutes and built my hand strength up to milk 3 jerseys in a row. (don’t tell me I have popeye forearms – I prefer the comparison to Rosie the Riveter). I learned how to split wood with a maul, which they brought in with teams of horses (they use Belgians as draft horses for most of the work on the farm)

In the meantime, I drove down each Wednesday for a class in Greenfield “Tilling the Soil of Opportunity”. I came out of the class with a business plan for a CSA in western mass. Between that and working with Target Hunger on establishing a relationship with a farm out there, I’ve been busy!

Italia!

I got a scholarship to attend the Spannocchia Foundation Farmer to farmer exchange – 5 days of talking with amazing farmers, chefs and advocates from New England and Tuscany. Totally fascinating. I would have thought that Italy was much further along in the “local food movement” than the US – after all, it always seemed that Italians loved food, and still had a much more highly developed and maintained food culture. They wouldn’t be heating up T.V. dinners and going through the McDonald’s drive thru.

I was somewhat shocked. The Italians do of course have a deeply rooted food culture, which much more identification of “terroir”, or regional products. However, most of the markets in the city centers are now wholesale markets (like Haymarket in Boston) – they are largely NOT farmers from that area selling their products directly to the customer. CSA’s a pretty much unheard of. and perhaps most shocking to me was that in driving along the Tuscan countryside, the vast majority of the rowcrops were planted with an orientation uphill/downhill, instead of following the horizontal contour like we would over here. This uphill orientation creates such a huge risk of severe erosion. After talking with the Tuscan farmers, it sounds like it shifted around the 1950’s, as farmers transitioned from using animal power (mostly oxen) to tractors. Tractors were much more likely to tip when driving across a hillside. And Tuscany, like New England, is almost all hills, with few flat plains.

Spannocchia is an estate that takes in conferences and runs an apprenticeship program to introduce more young peole to farming. They specialize in continuing to raise heritage breeds of swine and cows, and they smoke and cure their own pork products to make prosciutto, lardo, and all other kinds of salumi.

February was about the perfect time for me to go – although it wasn’t that warm in italy, it was in the 50-60’s so much warming than upstate new york! And I had a pretty much unsatiable appetite after walking on the farm, so I could eat tons of Italian food, from the salumi and desserts at the Spannocchia (my favorite was a Pear and Chocolate torte on a crust based on chestnut flour), to the Gelato and endless espressos in Florence. I spent an extra couple of days in Florence at the beginning of the trip, and on top of eating amazing food went to see the incredible statue of David at the Accademia, to visit the Uffizi, to put a coin under the tongue of this boar in one of the marketplaces, and to climb up to the top of the Duomo.

On the way to Italy, I overheard a bunch of folks at the Frankfurt airport talking about farming. In English. I finally went up to them and asked if they farmed. “yes – we farm at the Farm School, in Athol, MA”. I had no idea at that point that I would go on to work there but it was a lovely way to watch the whole winter come full circle.

Back to the blogstone

Ok I was going to claim that I stopped writing the blog because it was no longer 2008, but in reality I just got lazy. and i had less consistent email access. but mostly laziness.

So I will speed through some of the early 2009 highlights. where to start? Here's a bit of a timeline:
Christmas 2008: Vancouver with the family. it snowed. about 15 inches. I got to see Alice and Liz and Andrew and of course the family. And then we went through Seattle, watched them throw fish at Pikes market, and then to Portland to see my aunt and uncle. There was much coffee drinking, some art museums, and good time.

New Years: I spent with Anna and James in Maryland. I also celebrated with Michelle Obama's aunt and uncle. Then I went out to see Grant in Frederick

Mid January: I went to California. It was lovely. everyone watched a whale breach off the beach (I missed it). i did however get to go for a lovely hike and a swim in the Marin headlands. beautiful. then I flew to DC, visited a farm or two, and got to see my friend Leah. I missed the inauguration, but such is life.

End of January: I moved from Boston to Essex Farm, up on Lake Champlain. There was a lot of snow, a lot of eating pork. I made 200+ pounds of soap with Anthony, developed a new "Cream of Essex" cereal from rye, corn meal and wheat flour, cooked up with lard and a touch of yogurt. delicious.

Mid February: I headed to Florence and then Spannocchia, an estate in Italy for a New England/Tuscan farmer exchange. Possibly the best timing ever - I had been farming in a cold place so I had a pretty much unsatiable appetite. So Italian food was amazing. Lots of cured meats, tiramisu, gelato and things made with chestnut flour. Also ran into a bunch of folks talking in English about farming in the airport - turned out they were from the Farm School. More about that little bit of serendipity later...I returned to Essex to split more wood and learn how to set up an evaporator for maple sugaring season.

Beginning of March: I moved to North Adams. Spend most of march and the first half of april living with my friend Jane, playing "Settlers of Catan" with Michael & Eric, going for burgers and beers with Katie, and babysitting two great 6-year-old twin girls, which largely consisted of feeding grass through the fence to small goats, reading princess stories (they owned quite a collection) and riding our bikes. pretty fun times. Here's Eric's evaporator.

I took advantage of my time off to go down and visit Mexico...five days of sun sun sun! Lots of cacti and a chance to see my parents new house.

Finally, April 20 I moved to Wendell and started as the Assistant Grower at the Farm School. It's a lovely little spot, I'm learning to drive forward straight while looking backwards, and getting loads of tractor experience. more details to follow...